Showing results for "Rick" in Literary Fiction

Joseph Levy leads a quiet life in rural Wheaton, Arizona. Retired from a long career in psychiatric research and practice, he reads, writes, and wanders through the mountains and hills near the Native reservation. His quiet life ends, however, when a dental crown replacement goes poorly just before meeting an internet date in California. Thus begins a year of back-to-back nightmare infections, a drug overdose, and two failed relationships.

The year is 1973. As a freak winter storm bears down on an exclusive, affluent suburb in Connecticut, cars skid out of control, men and women swap partners, and their children experiment with sex, drugs, and even suicide. Here two families, the Hoods and the Williamses, com face-to-face with the seething emotions behind the well-clipped lawns of their lives-in a novel widely hailed as a funny, acerbic, and moving hymn to a dazed and confused era of American life.

Xiang Li Cheng, the President of the People's Republic of China, has both a problem and a plan in Rick Campbell's thrilling Empire Rising. The problem is that the limited supply of oil available to China is threatening to derail his country's economic growth and prosperity. But to secure access to those resources, he must contend with powerful U.S. Navy and the Pacific Fleet. After a decades-long largely secret military build up, Cheng sets his plan in motion by suddenly invading Taiwan and drawing the Pacific Fleet in to its defense.

Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors.

An aging New Yorker, a writer named Nick, feels life ebbing out of him. One night, at a dimly lit bar, he meets a tantalizing young woman, and the night that follows is the most extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he tastes human blood for the first time and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy. His revival quickly fades, and soon Nick is yearning for another taste of the elusive rapture.

Electric Literature Aloud! is a compendium of 10 short stories from the anthology series. The editors select stories with a strong voice that capture readers and listeners and lead them somewhere exciting, unexpected, and meaningful.

World on Fire picks up where Magnificent Vibration left off: with the hapless Bobby Cotton and his beloved bride (and former nun), Alice, having unleashed a global pandemic that’s fast wiping out half the world’s population - and at God’s request. Bobby guides a very pregnant Alice and a motley crew of survivors to the Holy Land, darting through the hazards of a world that has fallen to pieces in a way more thorough than any we have seen. But Bobby’s newborn daughter is born with astonishing abilities, and she’s not alone.

After making an unexpected connection with God via his cell phone, one man embarks on an unlikely spiritual quest in this smart, savvy, rambunctious debut from author Rick Springfield. After serendipitously stealing a mysterious self-help book called Magnificent Vibration: Discover Your True Purpose from a bookstore, Bobby calls the 1-800 number scrawled inside the front cover, only to discover that he has a direct line to God - and that God likes to mess with him.

Life is always hard for the poor, in any place and at any time. Ethan Frome is a farmer in Massachusetts. He works long hours every day, but his farm makes very little money. His wife, Zeena, is a thin, grey woman, always complaining, and only interested in her own ill health. Then Mattie Silver, a young cousin, comes to live with the Fromes, to help Zeena and do the housework. Her bright smile and laughing voice bring light and hope into the Fromes’ house - and into Ethan’s lonely life.

On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, Doctor Quintana pines for head nurse Menéndez while he and his colleagues embark on a grisly series of experiments to investigate the line between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence?

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, "The Crawling Hand." Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars.

Louis danced with the Devil for a long time, but on this day, there was going to be a new fiddler. After the shooting, Jesse turned to Raymond and said, "If he'd thrown those bags of lobster that he stole from us, overboard, we never woulda caught him." Ten bags of free lobster at a hundred pounds each was just too much for Louis to throw away. Hell, that's what I'm out here for, he must have thought.

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. The stories in Storm have more to say than that. Deep Blue offers compelling tales of shipwrecks and salvage, submarine adventure and free diving, nautical survival and cannibalism.

Jackboy was born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation. His constant attempts to escape finally pushed the masters too far. They punished the whole family by splitting them up and selling them off. His father’s last words had been, “It’s okay, son, don’t never give up.” Several years later, wracked by guilt, but still obsessed with freedom, he slips away from a South Carolina tobacco plantation and outsmarts the Confederacy’s most vicious slave patrol captain who is hot on his trail.

“The Hermit’s Story,” a short story by Rick Bass, brings listeners to a remote mountainous place where two couples are having Thanksgiving dinner together. Up in the mountains, things are always quiet. In the valley below, one can usually find the hustle and bustle of a town—but not this Thanksgiving. The power is out, and a deep, dark peace holds the land.

Dans la lignée de "Brooklyn" de Colm Tóibín et de "La Fenêtre panoramique" de Richard Yates, la chronique subtile et nostalgique d'un couple en pleine crise, sur fond de persécution maccarthyste. Rick Gekoski livre un roman d'une maîtrise impressionnante, flirtant avec l'autofiction, une œuvre aussi douce-amère que lumineuse. En cet été caniculaire 1953, les Grossman déménagent, préférant quitter l'agitation politique de Washington pour une tranquille vie de banlieue à Long Island.

Paris and Helen - more than a romance, this audiobook depicts the adventures and inner life of the Trojan prince Paris, a complex figure in a world of stark simplicity, moving through passion, betrayal, and violence to a stunning finale. Through interpolation of gripping action scenes, tender vignettes, and vivid dialogue, the audiobook gives new depth and richness to the classic story of Paris, Helen of Troy, and the war their stolen love engendered.

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young illiterate black man, is falsely convicted of murder and is sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, agrees to talk with the condemned man. The two men forge a bond as they come to understand what it means to resist and defy one's fate.

A woman finds a head in her mother's garden. Things get weirder when the head talks to her....

A laidback Caribbean saga of an innocent, Buck Devore, who sails into the middle of a killing field. Devore is in deep with good-looking women, a killer, and trouble.